Establishing Goals for your Manufacturing organization

Planning for success should be one of the most important philosophies of your manufacturing organization. Improving customer satisfaction is often at the top of the list for several companies. If you are looking for ways to reduce costs and improve quality with your manufacturing organization, you need to start by establishing goals for your manufacturing organization.

It is useful to have a means of forecasting to measure the effectiveness of your manufacturing organization. One of the best approaches you can take to measuring your existing goals is to look at the most successful companies. Take a good look at how they are organized and adopt their structure.

There are several different scenarios you must consider when you are creating goals for your manufacturing organization. Each scenario should feature success criteria for the future and compare it to your business's current state. Discuss which elements can be improved for each area and create a planning outline.

When you are looking to improve the quality of a particular area to establish goals for your manufacturing organization, begin with the following steps:

• Define your focus area
• Identify key elements
• Conduct research
• Establish your budget
• Design a selection process
• Set timelines

Define your focus area

Your focus area can include a particular region, product, or stage in the manufacturing process. If your company is a technology-based manufacturer, you will have a particular need to focus on research and development. Technological innovation is typically what will separate your manufacturing organization from your competitors.

If you can define your focus area in the beginning instead of toward the end of your goal making process, it will make the overall process smoother and easier to manage. Determine which type of product you are selling and how much you want to sell it for. For example, if you are a clothing manufacturer you should define the style of clothing you produce, the price, gender, and size. The market for clothes is wide and varied so this stage will take a lot of thinking on your part. The same can go for practically any product for any company. Defining your target audience is essential to establish proper goals for your manufacturing company. Identify key elements

Identify key elements

In this stage of the goal making process you need to identify the key people and elements that will make your business plan successful.

A good group of people should include:

• Key business decision makers
• Technical experts
• Experienced peers

This group of people will form your steering committee. The steering committee is essential to drive the process forward. You should also include stakeholders from the business and technical side of your manufacturing organization.

Other key elements should include the type of distribution your organization offers. Take a good look at your existing distribution process and consider the capacity and supplier deals that you can obtain. Are you willing to offer discounts to those who order large quantities of your product? Do you currently offer discounts that are costing your manufacturing organization too much money?

Conduct research

Your steering committee will guide the initial research and overall business analysis. Take a good look at your inventory methodology and relevant issues that are slowing your production process. Your business software and hardware also need to be evaluated. Outdated hardware and software could be causing several of the problems with the overall flow of productivity. Decide if there is something you can do to resolve any of these problems.

Determining the market is another critical element in the research process. Look at the market you are currently targeting and decide if it is even a market anymore. New products tend to cause the market to shift and you may be marketing to an outdated market. Your competitors can give you a good idea about the market. Take a look at where they are marketing and discuss what you think the reasons behind their strategy are. It is worth the time to find out everything you can about your competitors. If you are a small manufacturing organization, take a look at the big manufacturing organizations. You can obtain an annual report from their websites and read up on their history. The more you know about your competitors, your chances to improve your quality will increase.

Research your customers and find out why they purchase particular products. Some customers purchase strictly based on price while others will purchase for the brand name. Understanding your customers buying patterns will go a long way in establishing goals for your manufacturing organization. You will be able to decide when the peak buying times are and decide whether or not to market at a particular time. This will help you keep your inventory levels smaller so you don't loose money.

Some other sources you can contact include salesmen, industry directories, trade associations, and buying offices. Each contact you make will be able to provide you a little insight to the buying patterns of your target audience.

Establish your budget

Perhaps one of the biggest areas you need to focus on for your goal making process is establishing your budget. Your steering committee will determine the budget and decide what can be cut and what needs to be added. This step will involve different areas of analysis and the pressing needs and issues at hand. Your areas of lost revenue, poor productivity, and low return on investment will all be discussed and a resolution of how to solve these issues will be discussed. Each member at your manufacturing organization needs to understand these costs and discuss how they can reduce the waste and eliminate extra expenses to the company.

It is hard to say exactly what your budget will be as each company will have different factors to take into consideration. Your budget should include factors like what types of expenses your company is willing to make in order to enhance your operation to improve quality.

Establishing Goals for your Manufacturing organization links

• Lean Manufacturing
  This web site talks about lean manufacturing and establishing goals for your manufacturing organization. It discusses the impact consumers have on manufacturing firms and how you can improve the quality of your work.
• International University for Social Science
  The International University for Social Science discusses the goal differences between different departments in a manufacturing organization. It discusses the causes and consequences between goal differences and their overall impact.
• ASC
  The ASC's primary focus is the sealant and adhesive industry. They serve this industry to advocate to state and federal governments on their behalf. They provide new information on how companies are doing compared to their peers.
• Advanced Technology Institute
  The Advanced Technology Institute helps to develop and implement solutions for the manufacturing industry. They provide research portfolios that can be matched to particular companies to help them achieve success.

Video

Design a selection process

The selection process should take a good look at your existing vendors and decide which vendors are giving you adequate return on your investment.

Your steering committee should ask the following questions:

• What do we expect from our vendors?
• What are the delivery requirements?
• Do we want a single vendor?
• Who will be in charge of support and implementation?

The overall plan is to focus on certain areas of your manufacturing organization that need to reduce waste and increase productivity. Predict future needs for the business like software and hardware additions.

Set timelines

Everything in your manufacturing organization should have a timeline. You need to set a schedule on your selection process or else it may go on for a long time. Your goal planning process should have timelines established for each goal that is achieved.

Some of the goals to consider include the following:

• Focus areas
• Vendor list
• Budget
• Steering committee selection

After you have gone through all of the above steps to create an outlined goal for the manufacturing organization, you can begin looking at the smaller project details like design, production, sales, and marketing. There are helpful tools to implement that will help you improve your overall customer satisfaction.

The Six Sigma approach and the Process Capability study can help you improve your customer satisfaction.

Process Capability can be broken down into 2 parts:

1. Measure the variable of a process

2. Compare that variable with a proposed specification or product tolerance

The Process Capability study is typically performed for two reasons:

1. To predict future capability of the process to produce product within specification.

2. To identify process improvement opportunities.

The goal of the process is to meet the customer requirements, specifications, or product tolerances.

On the other hand, the Six Sigma approach is primarily focused on eliminating defects to improve all process to a level of 3.4 defects per one million opportunities.

The Six Sigma approach addresses:

• Continuous efforts to reduce variation in process outputs is key to business success
• Manufacturing and business processes can be measured, analyzed, improved and controlled
• Succeeding at achieving sustained quality improvement requires commitment from the entire organization, particularly from top-level management

Some people have argued that Six Sigma is a basic approach to improving quality. Many do use Six Sigma as a cost-cutting process and not for innovation of new products. The Process Capability study shows that if process changes are implemented at the right time for the right reasons will have a positive outcome on the product. If done during the study, a process change only introduces error and uncertainty. After the study is completed, you can then introduce changes to improve the process. The end result of the study is designed to meet customer expectations, specifications, and product tolerances.

This is unlike Six Sigma which is a data-driven, systematic approach to problem solving. Six Sigma has the customer in mind at all times and continually looks for ways to improve the overall satisfaction of the customer from the beginning.

Both the Process Capability Study and Six Sigma believe in planning for success. Six Sigma is typically used by manufacturing organizations on a continual basis. There are 2 different approaches to the Six Sigma process that can improve your manufacturing organization, the DMADV method and the DMAIC method.